seems going melee is a huge disadvantage to building a ranged character in this game.
Yes, melee is seriously gimped. Even if you spend a real life week or two training melee, you'll probably still have better attack odds with ranged combat. If you do want to go melee, I suggest crafting a driller. It's cheap and easy to get materials for, and does more base damage than the cheaper guns.
Oh,
Important:
PUT ALL LEVELUP POINTS INTO CONSTITUTIONYou cannot train constitution. Levelup points are the only way to increase it. It caps at 200, though, so if you put points elsewhere for a couple levels, you're not forever crippled, just inconvenienced for a while.
By tomorrow we should have functional storage units in the safehouse and can start expanding it to produce food, water, and increase our hp/sp regen when we rest there.
The living quarters is the room that increases stamina regeneration. However, the increase is only 5% per level of the structure, and you only receive the bonus if you do "dedicated resting." Meaning...you can't train skills at the same time. It's not very worthwhile.
Some of the buildings don't do anything. The lookout post, for example. And barricades do nothing because zombies can't attack in the current version.
The most important things to upgrade are the various storage facilities and however much generator you need to accommodate them. The training facililities are kind of nice, but training is so slow in this game that it will take weeks of real time before you'll ever need them. They don't actually help your training, they increase your training cap. The default npc-owned training facilities should be enough to keep you covered for a long time.
Logging outside is very dangerous and a big no-no
Sort of yes...good advice to log out indoors, but death is fairly trivial. Anyone can see you on the map, come by and heal you, and even if that doesn't happen you just pay 50 stamina and you're back up and fine.